Posts Tagged ‘financial reform’

Just two years after the Wall Street banks were bailed out and just three months after we passed a tough new law to rein them in, the Wall Street bankers want weak regulations so they can keep making risky bets with your money.

Because of the upcoming election, the banks apparently thought nobody would notice that they redeployed their horde of lobbyists to try to weaken the new rules as they’re being written.

They were wrong. We noticed. And we need your help to fight back.

Regulators with the Financial Stability Oversight Counsil are accepting public comments on the new law’s important “Volcker rule.” The rule is named for Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve and a vocal White House official who called on Congress to stop banks from making risky bets for their own profit while relying on taxpayer bailouts if the bets go bad.

I’d love to see the brilliant, no-nonsense Ms. Warren on teevee analyzing the big shitpile and spelling out exactly how the GOP and its enablers stacked the deck in favor of their sugar daddies at the expense of the middle class.

This issue has nothing to do with “liberals” and “conservatives”; it has to do with power, and who really has it in Washington. Elizabeth Warren has no shot of being confirmed by this Congress because, as Dick Durbin once admitted, “the banks own the place.”

More than a year and a half after Wall Street crashed the global economy, Congress has finally taken important action to rein in the Wall Street titans. The Wall Street reform bill is a crucial first step, passed despite the financial sector’s enormous investments in lobbying and campaign contributions. But Wall Street remains far too powerful in Washington, with the result that this bill does not contain crucial reforms that must be included in subsequent reform efforts.

On the positive side of the ledger, the bill contains stronger consumer financial protections and curbs on some of the worst practices in the derivatives markets. (more…)

The U.S. House of Representatives brought us one step closer to meaningful financial reform Wednesday when it voted (mostly on party lines, with only three Republicans supporting the bill) to pass the conference report on the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. David Arkush, director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division, called it “a significant, initial victory for Main Street over Wall Street.” While there is still much more to do to rein in Wall Street’s reckless behavior, the financial reform bill offers a couple significant steps forward, Arkush said:

The two most notable are substantially stronger consumer financial protections and curbs on some of the worst practices in the derivatives markets.

The Senate is expected to vote on the conference report after the holiday break. Chris Bowers at Open Left offers an in-depth analysis:

If the bill is defeated by pro-Wall Street forces over the next two weeks, the only parts which will be defeated are the victories, while all of its shortcomings will remain in place. If it is defeated, the 1999 financial deregulation package will remain the basic framework under which our financial system operates, and we all know how that worked out.

Wall Street, an ant? You mean the bankers who have been spending more than a million dollars a day on lobbyists to kill the bill? You mean the gargantuan institutions whose reckless, predatory actions caused the near-collapse of the financial system and plunged us into the Great Recession? Sorry, I’m really not seeing anything ant-like here.

And then he says the reform bill is like a nuclear weapon. I guess he’s trying to say it’s too strong. Yeah, there are some good, strong regulations in the bill, like the consumer financial protection bureau and increased transparency in the derivatives market. (more…)

The army of “revolving door” lobbyists bidding for the financial services industry is even larger that we thought. After combing through Senate lobbying disclosure records, we reported in November that at least 940 lobbyists in the financial services sector.

This week, we partnered with the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) on an update to that report that included data from CRP’s in-house revolving doors database (catching lobbyists who do not report to their employment histories on their lobbying disclosure forms) as well as Senate records showing an additional two reporting quarters.